Sanbolic Melio supports SQL Server clustering

Sanbolic
offers Melio, a family of products, designed to provide the capability
to increase database and virtual desktop availability and performance
through clustering. Sanbolic is calling this capability AppCluster.
This clustering capability is designed to support physical, virtual and
both public and private cloud offerings. Recently, the company
announced an enhanced Melio module that is designed to manage
active-active clusters of servers supporting Microsoft's SQL Server.

Here's what the company has to say about the announcement:

Sanbolic®, the market leader
in data management, today announced the launch of Sanbolic® AppCluster™
support for public clouds. Sanbolic AppCluster, a Microsoft SQL Server
specific module within its Melio™ software, extends the agility, high
availability (HA), and scalability of SQL Server workloads across
physical, virtualized, and now – both private and public cloud
environments. With the addition of public cloud support, customers will
be able to further minimize the cost and complexity of managing SQL
Server clusters, while extending the economics of public cloud to one of
the most widely deployed database server and information platforms in
the world.

Due to its popularity and rapid deployment, SQL Server sprawl has
become a common and significant hurdle to overcome, as well as other
associated issues such as poor utilization, added cost and management
complexity. And, while SQL Server virtualization can help customers
consolidate server instances, it too presents its own set of problems
and limitations. Sanbolic’s Melio™ has helped such customers to
drastically improve application agility, availability and performance
while improving storage utilization and reducing the management cost
required to support clustered SQL Server environments.

Now, all of the capabilities that Sanbolic Melio users have
benefited from within their private data centers can be enjoyed in the
public cloud, along with all of the added advantages a public cloud can
provide. Delivered via the world’s most well-known and trusted public
cloud providers, Sanbolic AppCluster enables existing enterprise-class
clustered SQL Server users to confidently move this area of their IT
infrastructure into the public cloud in order to dramatically lower the
associated costs and management burden, as well as ensure always-on
availability and on-demand scalability. For rapidly growing business
organizations, the new service allows them to quickly and affordably
access enterprise-class IT infrastructure, which was previously beyond
their reach from both an operational and capital expense perspective –
thereby helping to level the playing field between their company and
larger more established competitors, as well as re-focus the highly
valuable time and expertise of their IT organization on activities that
directly contribute to the bottom-line, speed time-to-market and
increase competitive advantage.

Snapshot analysis

Organizations wishing to deploy database-based applications in a
number of environments to increase levels of scaleability, availability
and to create viable disaster recovery plans face significant
challenges.

Microsoft's SQL Server, like many traditional SQL
databases, was designed with a static physical host configuration in
mind. Moving instances around to create a dynamic environment that
includes physical, virtual and both public and private clouds can be
quite challenging. Both product configuration and licensing issues get
in the way. This leads to organizations to deploy more instances of the database than might be required.

Sanbolic
is addressing this issue using a combination of its technologies
including its Melio FS, a clustered file system and its LaScala, volume
manager to create a .NET-based Windows service. This service works with
Windows SQL Management Studio to create a clustering solution.

If this approach appears to solve your company's database challenges, it would be worth seeing a demo.